A public poll for the Library of Congress to choose 65 books by US authors that had a profound effect on American life has thrown up some surprises.

Herbert’s Dune, a 1965 science-fiction novel adapted into a film starring Sting, Pirsing’s cult classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and children’s favourite The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss – real name Theodore Geisel – all make the cut. So too does the prolific and popular Stephen King with The Stand.

But literary giants such as William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, John Updike and Tom Wolfe do not. The library, the biggest in the world with more than 162m items, does not claim the list is a definitive rank of greatness.

Guy Lamolinara, director of National Book Festival, said: “It’s not supposed to be a diverse list or the best American books. It’s the books that are most dear to people.”

Novels were the clear winner over biographies and histories. “I’m most surprised how much of it is fiction,” Lamolinara added. “It shows people’s fascination with the creative process of writing.”

Some 17,200 people responded to the library’s survey. Of the 65 books included, 40 were picked directly by the public. An additional 25 titles were selected by the public from a list created for the 2012 Library of Congress exhibition Books That Shaped America.

A new free exhibition, America Reads, opened at the library on Thursday, featuring rare editions usually withheld from public view, along with a video in which six Pulitzer Prize winners, including Jennifer Egan and Rita Dove, discuss the books that they think shaped the US.

Perhaps reflecting preoccupations in a presidential election year, the new batch of 40 titles has a healthy dose of politics. There is Profiles in Courage, a Pulitzer-winning book ostensibly by the former president John F Kennedy, though since alleged to have been mostly written by Ted Sorensen, his speechwriter and aide. Also present is All the President’s Men, journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s account of the Watergate scandal that toppled Richard Nixon, adapted into a movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.

And there is more than a hint of Donald Trump. Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men charts the rise of a demagogue, while Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead features an egocentric architect with whom the Republican nominee has said he identifies. Indeed, Rand, whose Republican admirers include Trump and the House speaker, Paul Ryan, also has Anthem in the list of 40 books, adding to Atlas Shrugged on the original list of 25.

“Ayn Rand evidently has a large fanbase,” Lamolinara commented.

Other striking choices on the new list include Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and East of Eden, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and The Sun Also Rises, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Among the less conventional books is The Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith’s 1830 sacred text of the Latter-day Saint movement; Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child; and the stage plays Death of a Salesman and The Crucible by Arthur Miller.

The original group of 25 included canonical texts such as Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, Dr Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care.